1. Technical Field
The presently disclosed embodiments are directed to generating an aggregate document slice from an existing aggregate document in a computing environment.
2. Brief Discussion of Related Art
Networks, such as intranets and the Internet, give people access to vast amounts of networked documents from different sources. Recently, the notion of aggregate documents has been introduced. An aggregate document can be generated using a collection of separate individual documents from different sources (e.g., source documents). One or more pages of the source documents can be included as an ordered sequence of data pages or sub-documents in the aggregate document.
An aggregate document can be represented as a content trail, where each subdocument or data page in the aggregate document can be a node in the trail. Users can “walk” the trail by following nodes of the trail along a path defined by relationships between the nodes. A trail can be displayed as a map of the connections between nodes, giving users a quick view of the high level structure of the aggregate document and the possible pathways users can take through the trail to discover information about topics included in the aggregate document. For example, a content trail can be displayed as a directed graph. As the number of subdocuments or data pages increases in the aggregate document, the map can become increasingly complex and difficult to interpret.
For example, an aggregate document constructed for the purpose of organizing research materials for a graduate thesis could grow quite large and have numerous subtopics resulting in complex relationships forming complex patterns and/or pathways. Comprehending the context of the different nodes and the paths through the subtopics can become difficult. Even with zoom and pan capabilities, focusing on only the portions of the map of the content trail corresponding to the aggregate document a user considers relevant at a given time can be a challenge.
A sample of a moderately complex content trail 800 is shown in FIG. 8. Although there are only 35 nodes 802 and few branches, the trail 800 has become almost unmanageable. This management problem is of comprehension, or in selecting which portions are most interesting. If a user wished to walk a designated default path from start to finish in their browser, it would be a simple process. Likewise, exporting the entire aggregate document represented by the trail to a single printable format would be no harder than for any other trail. However, in both the following and printing cases, the users would be forced to accept the content and organization of the whole and sift through it for the parts meaningful to them afterwards, leading to a prototypical case of information overload.